Sinister Sweden

This summer, we went to Sweden for our holidays.

Before we went, I have to admit that I knew very little about Sweden, and what I did know was mostly gleaned from the books of John Ajvide Linqvist (Let the Right One In, Handling the Undead) and the TV series The Bridge, both of which tend to suggest that Sweden is a country littered with corpses as opposed to interesting tourist attractions. There was also M.R.James' fabulously scary story Count Magnus, about the unfortunate fate of unwary antiquarian traveller Mr. Wraxall.

Rosemary Pardoe, editor of Ghosts and Scholars, the M.R.James journal, wrote a very interesting article in 2001 titled Who was Count Magnus? which you can read online here. It includes some discussion of the possible location of the story, seemingly somewhere in southern Sweden, although M.R.James muddied the waters very much by naming his fictional estate Råbäck after a real-life one he had visited, and then saying that this was not the real name of the place! At any rate, my travels this time did not take me to Varnhem, Skara or Råbäck. I did however take an interest in the environment and landscape in general, and in Swedish churches in particular, hoping to soak up a bit of Jamesian atmosphere along the way.

Family holidays (especially for families who are weary from office work and exams) are not the ideal situation for antiquarian exploring. So I decided that I would have to be selective about the places I visited, to avoid trespassing on the patience and goodwill of everyone else too much. I wanted to see an older church - preferably mediaeval - and for preference, something a little like the church in M.R.James's story, which had white walls, a copper roof and an onion shaped dome on the mausoleum adjoining it. A little research on Google turned up Slättåkra church (pictured above) which has the white walls and copper roof and surrounding trees; there was no adjoining mausoleum but the tower had a vaguely dome-shaped apex!

In the ghost stories of M.R.James there is often a handy sacristan or other useful local person about to give directions or let the hero into the church. Luckily for me, this actually happened at Slättåkra. I did not realise until afterwards, when I read a friend's blog posts about her attempts to visit some churches in that same part of Sweden, that the majority are kept locked, so the most you can expect to get on a casual visit is photographs of the outside. When we rolled up at Slättåkra and tried the church door, it was indeed locked, but there was a gardener working in the graveyard, and she very kindly agreed to let us in.

The interior of the church was very charming. It did indeed have a "handsome old organ, gaily painted, and with silver pipes" (although not as old as the one in the story would have been; this is only about sixty years old in its current format!):

The ceiling was painted, although not with a "strange and hideous ‘Last Judgement'" as in the story; instead there were more peaceful scenes such as this one of the Ascension, a rather droll depiction showing only the legs of Jesus vanishing into the clouds:

The story also says that "the pulpit was like a doll’s-house covered with little painted wooden cherubs and saints" and the one in Slättåkra church was certainly very much like that:

There was no mausoleum adjoining the church, although there was this strange little building near the churchyard gate:

I had a peep through one of those side windows, although I wasn't expecting to see "fine marble effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament" in anything so modern. Inside there was a bier, clearly for the storage of coffins prior to burial. The bier was not in use(!) but all the same I didn't wait around to see if there would be any mysterious clangs, nor did I chant “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” under my breath...

As a codicil to this church visit, a day or two later we went to the open air museum in nearby Halmstad. The museum is located on the Galgberget or "gallows hill" and comprises a number of very old buildings including a windmill and a nineteenth century schoolhouse. We toured these, and inside the schoolhouse we saw this, a monk's costume:

I was irresistibly reminded of the cloaked figure who haunts poor Mr. Wraxall in Count Magnus, sometimes appearing as a traveller in a dark cloak, sometimes taken for a Catholic priest in a cassock.  Perhaps Count Magnus was pursuing me after all...

With kind thanks to Ing-Marie Abrahamsson and Ann Giles. 

Ghosts in an Oxford college

I was ferreting about amongst some of my papers today (yes, I do still have papers, even in this digital world) and realised that I have just passed the tenth anniversary of the publication of my very first piece of fiction. It wasn't a novel (the first of those wasn't published until 2009); it was a ghost story, Nathair Dhubh, and it appeared in the 39th issue of the now defunct All Hallows magazine.

Nathair Dhubh means "black serpent" in Gaelic, and the story is about a notorious mountain crag of the same name. Shortly before World War Two, a couple of friends decide to ascend the "serpent" in spite of its having such an evil reputation that locals will not even look directly at it. Of course, this is not setting things up to end well...

That story is still in print, in my collection The Sea Change & Other Stories, published in 2013 by Dublin-based Swan River Press. Although the majority of my published work takes the form of YA novels, I've continued to write ghost stories over the years. Seven of them appeared in The Sea Change and I have written at least as many others. Most recently, my story The Dove, inspired by the real-life history of Kinkell Bridge, was published in Terror Tales of the Scottish Highlands from Gray Friar Press, and my Jamesian sequel The Third Time appeared in Salt Publishing's Best British Horror 2015. 

I'm pleased to say that the new issue of the long-running Supernatural Tales also features a story of mine. It's a special issue, because it's the thirtieth, and it is a testament to the dedication and hard work of editor David Longhorn that the magazine continues to flourish. As thirty is a significant number, David invited a number of authors whose work had previously appeared in Supernatural Tales to contribute something. So there are stories by Lynda E. Rucker, Michael Kelly, Steve Duffy and Adam Golaski as well as myself. In addition, there is a tale by Mark Valentine which is a tribute to the late Joel Lane. All in all, a very fine line-up, and although I wouldn't dare comment on my own story, I can say that the other contributions are all very good indeed.

Because I had a bit of advance warning, I decided that I would write a story on the theme of "thirty". So I spent quite a lot of time toying with ideas involving people who expected something particularly nasty to happen to them on their thirtieth birthday, etc. Eventually I came up with a room number 30, which has a pernicious effect on anyone who spends the night in it. I'm not wedded to the idea of the "traditional" ghost story - one of my others was set in the modern world of sub-aqua diving, for example - so as the story developed, I was surprised at how very traditional the setting of 30 ended up!

The action takes place in an Oxford College, which I gave the fictitious name of Old College. I could of course have used a real college name, but I hit upon Old's as a tribute to one of my favourite creepy stories, the brilliant Lot 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, set in "what we will call Old College in Oxford". I had a bit of fun with some of the other names in my story, too: Drummond is a local name here in Perthshire, where I now live; Longhorn is, of course, the surname of Supernatural Tales' editor, Duffy is the surname of one of the other contributors, and Bond is the surname of a whole host of my relatives.

Supernatural Tales 30 (and its predecessors) can be purchased online from the Supernatural Tales website or if you prefer, it is available in a kindle edition, which can be purchased here. The kindle price is a very modest 99p for nearly 80 pages of thrills, creeps and scares!

Above: Supernatural Tales 30 - I dare you to read it by candlelight!

Scottish book event!

22nd-23rd August 2015 sees the third ever Crieff Arts Festival, with exhibitions, live music, arts and crafts sessions - plus a literary event hosted by arts hub Strathearn Artspace.

Crieff is home to the renowned Crieff Hydro with its Victorian spa and outdoor activity centre, the Famous Grouse distillery, MacRosty Park with its Pavilion cafe and children's play area, and near to it Lady Mary's Walk, an area of great natural beauty on the banks of the river Earn. A short drive also brings you to the Library of Innerpeffray, Scotland's oldest lending library. All these things attract visitors to the town. If you are thinking of coming, why not make it during Arts Festival weekend, when there are arty events to enjoy too?

I'm very pleased to say that I shall be taking part in a literary event at Strathearn Artspace on the Saturday, 22nd August. The plan is to have a "mini book festival" with a range of authors and poets reading from their work. I shall be reading a thrilling passage from one of my books! Doors will open at 10.00 am for a 10.30 am start, and run through until mid-afternoon. If you have a particular interest in one of the authors or one of the genres covered, you can drop in for that, or you can stay for the whole event and enjoy a variety of works. The full line-up is still being finalised but I will post it on this blog when it is all confirmed.

The event will conclude with a talk by myself about "getting published". (Like many other authors, no doubt) I am often asked questions about this - things like whether it is a better idea to send your work to an agent first or straight to a publisher, do you have to write the entire book before sending it to anyone, etc etc. In fact I think I get a lot more questions about this than I ever do about my own work! I've even run an evening class on it at Perth College UHI. So I'll be talking about that, and if you are able to come, and have your own work-in-progress in a drawer at home, come and ask me what you ought to do with it! NB I won't be looking at anyone's manuscript - the talk is about what to do with your finished work, rather than how to write it!

The event will finish mid-afternoon, after which there will be live music at the Artspace, and of course, continuing exhibitions to browse in the town. For further details check out http://www.crieffartsfestival.com and http://www.strathearnartspace.co.uk or see my future blog posts with the literary line up!

Dyeing for love

This is a story that has nothing to do with my books.

I don't think of myself as a person who is particularly sentimental about objects. We've moved around a lot over the years - Spain, Germany, Belgium, now Scotland - and it was never practical to take too many unnecessary belongings with us. When we left Britain in 2001, I gave away a lot of our baby stuff including the rocking cradle both our children slept in for their first few months, and when we moved from Germany to Belgium I gave away the rest. In a fit of throw-it-all-overboard I threw out my university matriculation photograph. I even gave away my treasured collection of Asian outfits (salwar kamiz, saris etc) because it really wasn't sensible to cart everything from country to country with us. The one thing I could never bear to part with was my wedding dress.

You can see me in the dress in the photo above. I bought it from Chanticleer in Cheltenham. It had a skirt made of ivory wild silk and a jacket made of dark red velvet. I had a headdress made of artificial flowers and raspberries in red, gold and green, and carried a bouquet of red roses with green and gold foliage.

I nearly did give it away, once. A charity was appealing for wedding dresses in good condition to resell to raise funds. I got as far as telephoning them and agreeing to donate the dress, and then at the last minute I just couldn't do it. I had to ring back and apologise. I don't know why I couldn't part with it. It's not as though we were planning a Hollywood-style renewal of vows at any point! Anyway, I kept it, and it travelled round with us over the years, inconveniently taking up far too much of my wardrobe space (the skirt was enormous).

Last year, though, I finally gave my dress away.

My daughter is now a teenager, and a passionate fan of manga and anime (Japanese style cartoons). I've taken her to the anime convention at Dundee University a few times, where we have rubbed shoulders with people cosplaying as Alucard out of Hellsing, L from Death Note, etc. She fancied cosplaying herself, but buying an entire costume including wig can be quite expensive, particularly if you are trying to budget for it on a teen allowance. I asked her what character she wanted to dress as, and she said Lacie Baskerville from the popular series Pandora Hearts. You can see Lacie on the Pandora Hearts Wiki site. Her costume is usually shown as purple, or sometimes a deep red colour.

I looked at the costume and wondered how on earth we could possibly get together a cosplay outfit based on it. The skirts alone are huge and voluminous, not the sort of thing you have lying around at the back of your wardrobe. Except...I did have something exactly like that.

I thought about it for a while before we did anything with the dress. Ruffles can be unpicked, but ivory silk, once dyed, is going to stay that colour forever. In the end, though, I decided to go ahead. I'm not saying it didn't give me a pang, because it did. But I liked the idea of using the dress for something new, instead of keeping it like a museum piece. Here's what happened.

First, we had to wet the silk overskirt. The best place was the kitchen sink, since it was metal and wouldn't stain.

Then my husband mixed up the red dye. This was definitely a family project! 

This was the point of No Return. The silk part of the dress went into the red dye. 

Afterwards, the skirt had to be rinsed in cold water, squeezed gently and left to dry. 

When the skirt was dry, we sewed on the white ruffles. My husband is much better with the sewing machine than I am, so he did the skirt, which seemed to need miles and miles of ruffles. I hand sewed the ruffles onto the velvet jacket myself; the material was thick and the job was quite fiddly. I ran out of ruffle ribbon at one point and had to go and buy some more! 

Finally, the costume was finished. The only thing my daughter actually had to buy was the wig to go with it, which was black and red. And here she is, wearing the whole outfit:

I said at the beginning that I'm not particularly sentimental about objects. I'm sentimental about people, though. I think she looks lovely in it. 

A grand day out in Fife

I saw the sea this weekend. Also hills, an ancient abbey, a square rigged sailing ship and a lot, really a lot, of motorway.

On Saturday (4th July) I had two book signings in Fife: one at Waterstone's in Kirkcaldy and the other at Waterstone's in Dunfermline. This was a fairly straightforward trip - except my husband was spending the day in Dundee as part of a Mountain Rescue team organising a charity abseil off the top of the dental hospital. And we only have one car. So my itinerary for the day took in not only Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline but Perth and Dundee! Anyway, although we set off in torrential rain in the morning, by lunchtime Fife was bathed in glorious sunshine, so it was actually rather nice to spend the day on a road trip. My teen daughter came with me, because she loves car drives and bookshops. At Waterstone's in Kirkcaldy she was offered chocolate chip cookies too, so I think her cup of joy pretty much overflowed.

I'd been to Dunfermline fairly recently, to visit the Abbey (well worth a visit - it's beautiful), but I'd only ever been to Kirkcaldy once before, years ago, when my kids were small. On that occasion we went to see Scottish kids' show The Singing Kettle. The show had a deep sea theme and as it was shortly after Finding Nemo came out, my kids both demanded to dress up as clownfish. I mainly remember tearing my hair trying to think of a way of making clownfish costumes! Anyway, after Saturday's visits, my daughter and I have vowed to visit both places again soon. We'd love to see Ravenscraig Castle, and my daughter would like to go around Dunfermline Abbey, as she wasn't with me last time.

Both branches of Waterstone's were extremely welcoming and had obviously put some thought into where to locate visiting authors, etc. Particular thanks to Alice at the Kirkcaldy store, who was absolutely brilliant and a super supportive host, and Ilse at Dunfermline, with whom I had some great chats about living abroad and the Dutch language (Veerle, the heroine of my Forbidden Spaces trilogy, is a Dutch speaker).
It was great to be so well looked after. Authors, if you are invited to either of these stores, take the opportunity and go if you can!

I very much enjoyed chatting to book lovers at both stores, and doing a bit of sneaky people-watching in quieter moments. I had to laugh about the man who came into one of the shops, asked me whether I was an author, and then said he never read books! I wonder what he was doing in a bookshop? I also smiled inwardly at the elderly lady who lingered for a long time outside the store, eyeing the display of 50 Shades of Grey books, and then came inside, looking distinctly furtive... Meanwhile, a big TSK TSK to the young man who saw his friend trying to come into the shop and pulled him outside again!

Thanks to those who chatted with me, and those who bought books. If anyone local to either of the stores would like a signed copy of any of my Forbidden Spaces books, there is a limited number of them at both Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline.

After the second signing, my daughter and I drove to Dundee to collect my husband, stopping off briefly in Perth to get something to eat. It sounded as though he had had a hair-raising day; for a large part of it, he was the team member actually at the edge of the roof of the hospital, gazing down at the grisly drop to the street below. The building is 150 feet high, which is frankly further off the ground than I like to be. We picked him up in front of the sailing ship Discovery, and I made him drive home.  Daughter and I had enjoyed our girls' road trip, but sometimes it's nice to sit in the passenger seat and vegetate!